vCenter Operations Manager 5.7 – What’s New and How to Upgrade

Released on April 4, 2013, vCenter Operations Manager makes the next step forward in managing your vSphere environment.

What’s New

vCenter Operations Manager 5.7 is the latest release of VMware’s integrated operations suite, converging performance, capacity, and configuration management. This new release introduces the following features and enhancements.

More Flexibility with Capacity Planning

Assess capacity risk and plan by allocation and/or actual demand: Set policies based on your varying business needs to assess capacity risk, efficiency, and forecast. For example, different buffers, over-commit ratios, alert thresholds, business hours, etc., across production and test-dev environments.

New views for Cluster Capacity Risk: Quickly identify via color-coded Cluster capacity risk view which clusters grouped by business criteria, etc., are at capacity risk—facing a capacity shortfall now or in the near future or just not sized right. Drill down for each cluster in the Cluster Risk Detail view to analyze which resource is it constrained on and why.

New policies for common environments and workloads: New out-of-the-box policies, such as Production and Test-Dev policies, enable quick set-up of vCenter Operations Manager capacity settings for common types of environments. Additional new out-of-the-box policies, such as Batch workload, Interactive workload, and Ignore VMs policies, help fine-tune capacity configuration settings to accurately right size and analyze different workloads based on their performance characteristics.

Improved Self-Monitoring

This release introduces new diagnostics metrics to monitor the health and availability of vCenter Operations Manager components, such as Analytics, Collector, Active MQ, Web server, database, and operating system.

Widgets with Improved Flexibility and Usability

Health Tree Widget: Easy visualization for large number of objects.

Generic Scoreboard Widget: Support for Sparkline, string metrics, and metrics filtering by resource.

Balanced Metrics Profile

This release introduces a new metrics profile that reports a reduced set of metrics. Increase the scalability of vCenter Operations Manager to support more resources by changing the metrics profile to the new “Balanced” profile in vCenter Operations Manager Administration.

VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator Filtering Capability

You can configure how resources discovered by vCenter Infrastructure Navigator are displayed in vCenter Operations Manager. This release introduces a configurable filtering capability to the vCenter Infrastructure Navigator adapter to control Application service and Application resource reporting. For each resource type, you can configure either “blackList” or “whiteList” filtering in the configuration file filterList.txt.

blackList: The vCenter Infrastructure Navigator adapter ignores specified entries. If an Application Service name or an Application name is included in the “blackList,” it is not reported by the vCenter Infrastructure Navigator adapter. This is the default setting. The vCenter Infrastructure Navigator adapter filters unknown Application service names by default.

whiteList: The vCenter Infrastructure Navigator adapter reports only the specified entries. If there are no entries added to the whiteList mode, none of the resources of the corresponding resource type are displayed.

New Browser Support

This release adds new support for the following browsers: Apple Safari version 6, Google Chrome versions 24 and 25, and Mozilla Firefox 18 and 19.